


It's Late

by Broken_Clover



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: F/M, I just needed to write something sad, Memories, Nostalgia, Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 11:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15533067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broken_Clover/pseuds/Broken_Clover
Summary: “Hey, Megumi. Sorry I’m late for dinner.”After 200 years, Axl returns home.





	It's Late

A bright, charming smile split Axl’s face as he stepped through the front door.

“Hey, Megumi. Sorry I’m late for dinner.”

The cheap formica countertop had been crushed under the force of the collapsed roof. A bit of rain was sprinkling in through the hole, the faint glow of dusk and lightning illuminating the room just enough. The sink had broken similarly some time before, allowing mould and moss to spider across the smashed counter and wall. The cream-colored tiles had been alternately sun-bleached and water-soaked to the point where they had taken on a sickly yellow color.

In the center of the room, somehow, the dinner table still managed to stand. One leg had snapped, and the surface was caked in dust, yet it stood faithfully. All of the chairs were either smashed, rotted, or merely been worn away, so Axl didn’t risk trying to sit. He merely took a finger and ran it across the tabletop, sighing at the long line it formed in the thick layer of dust.

“Guess the fish got cold while I was gone, huh?” He gave a quiet, mirthless laugh, which quickly petered out in the empty room.

If he were being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure why he had come back. It had taken so much effort to just get into this area of England, past the barriers and barricades made specifically to keep riffraff like him out and away. Even if he explained the situation, there was nobody that anyone was going to believe him, let alone allow him to walk into a war-torn district where everything was only a tap away from collapsing into rubble.

A week of sneaking, subterfuge, and trespassing, and for what? A mouldy, broken-down apartment that nobody had lived in for over a century.

The floorboards creaked underfoot as he continued to walk, the only noise aside from the rainfall echoing. It seemed like he had been the only thing to escape the decay and disarray, with the destroyed furniture and rotting walls everywhere he looked.

“You know me, I’m not great with time…” Axl kept talking. It felt like a habit. The apartment had never been quiet, either filled with their playful banter or by Rina’s noisy barking.

He spotted the tattered remains of a dog bed, still nestled into the corner. That much was familiar, even if it was covered in mould and overrun with insects that he didn’t care to get any closer to. It had been a big bed, far too large for a corgi, but now it was little more than a lump of cloth and rotting cotton.

“You been a good dog, Rina?”

If he closed his eyes, he could pretend nothing had changed. Like if he opened them again, things would be just like they used to. Megumi sprawled out on the couch after a long day at the diner, half-asleep eyes glancing up every so often to catch the beginning and end of the news. Rina would be curled up against her side, snoring as she was pet.

Megumi would notice him, pat the empty spot on the couch. He would walk over, settle down, and immediately feel her sleepily sit up against him and plant a kiss on his cheek. The motion would wake Rina up, and she would immediately jump on him, eager to shower his face with happy licks as her stubby tail wagged so hard that he half-expected it to fly off.

He reopened his eyes, and all that was left was a broken-down couch, stained black in various spots. Not even the old, battered TV was left behind, apparently broken or stolen at some point or another.

Part of the hallway was crushed under the long-dissolved body of a Gear. There was still enough space for him to slip under, though, and he found himself passing by and forcing open a rain-swelled door with his shoulder.

They hadn’t had much need for a study. It was something used by rich, educated people, and they were neither. It had still managed to find use as a place of storage, both of possessions and of memories. The far wall had all but fused into a tangle of rotting wood, with the old scrapbooks that Megumi had once meticulously put together in varying states of decay. The floor was littered with the various bits of busted machinery that he’d collected over the years, trying to piece things back together out of curiosity or just to have spare supplies to repair his bike or whatever appliance decided to crap out that week.

Despite the awful state of the shelves, Axl found himself pulling the books down. Some were nothing more than mushy piles of rot, which he thoughtlessly threw across the room to splatter on the floor. He leafed through the ones that still managed to retain some semblance of shape. As their outsides suggested, they were mostly waterlogged, but he pulled out all the pages and all of the photos that looked relatively intact and stuck them into his pockets, but not before staring at them longingly, eyes tracing Megumi’s elegant, looping handwriting, as he wondered how all of them could look so ancient when he could remember Megumi excitedly showing the new pages to him almost perfectly.

“You’re a nostalgic old bastard, Axl.” He sighed, shaking his head at his own work. “That’s what you are.”

He forced his way back out into the hallway, the door giving a sad squeak before slumping off of its hinges. He jumped back to avoid it falling, kicking up a plume of dust as it hit the ground and shook the entire floor. It was enough to remind him that the place wasn’t stable- honestly, he was amazed that a third-floor apartment could survive at all, what with everything that the world went through. Still, he felt no impulse to leave.

The bathroom and guest room had been rendered inaccessible by the collapsed roof, but somehow, the doorframe at the end of the hall looked almost untouched. He had pulled the door off not long after they had moved in, for some reason or another that he couldn’t remember. It offered an almost taunting glimpse at familiarity, even with the visible weathering of everything.

Wandering into the bedroom, he was amazed at how much of it had still manage to stay standing. The bed looked relatively stable, if moth-eaten and dirty. The bedside tables were rotted out but still managed to stay standing, with what he could assume was hope and the force of gravity taking a holiday. The lamps were smashed, the floor was caked in dirt, garbage, and scorch marks, but it was still in a better shape than some of the inns and taverns that he’d wandered into for the night.

He let his little longing fantasy play out. If Megumi wasn’t on the couch when he got home, she had already wandered off to bed. She would curl up on her side, Rina cuddled against her legs, and try not to get comfortable, or else she would doze off before he was back.

Of course, there was no Megumi waiting for him in bed, and no Rina. No familiar warmth and light greeted him when he entered, only the same hollow emptiness and musty odor that permeated the whole space.

The worst part of the whole thing, to him, was that it had managed to stay in a just-good-enough shape to be recognizable. He didn’t know how that was possible. Had Megumi kept things in place after he vanished? Had she never left the apartment, even with nothing but her own doubts holding her back? Had she somehow managed to preserve everything up until the day that the war broke out?

At that, he found his thoughts quickly slipping out of control. How old would she have been? Could she even have lived that long? Did some ticked-off druggie or gang member manage to find her at the wrong moment? Did she live long enough to watch the world go to hell, never knowing where he had gone to all those years ago? 

Had she moved on without him? While the thought of his beloved finding another partner made his heart sting, he also felt another stab of despair at the prospect that she had clung on to the thought of him coming back someday, somehow returning after so long with some explanation that would make all the years waiting worth it. He didn’t want that for her. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Something wet hit the floor. Axl glanced up at the ceiling, trying to find the new hole that the rain had managed to drip through, only to realize that the noise was of his own tears. He frantically rubbed them away, turning his attention back to the weathered old bed.

He sighed. “Guess it’s pretty late, isn’t it?”

With as much care as he could muster, he climbed onto the ancient mattress, ignoring the scent of mould and the creaking of half-destroyed springs trying to support his weight. When he was sure that it wasn’t going to collapse underneath him, he let muscle memory take over, huddling up like he used to every night, lying on one side with his limbs splayed out. 

If he let himself pretend, he could feel Megumi’s silky black hair in between his spread fingers. He would run them through gently, until she cuddled up against him in her half-asleep state in the search for something warm to lie against. She would murmur something cute and sappy as she fell asleep, sometimes something in Japanese that he couldn’t understand but felt all the same, and he would throw an arm around her to keep her close.

There was no soft hair, no warm body, no soft pleasantries to remind him that the world wasn’t as horrible as it often seemed. Just him. Just Axl, the nostalgic idiot, alone with memories of a world that didn’t exist anymore.

Still, even in the face of all that, he let himself pretend as he lay in bed. The rain falling into the living room was a gentle patter on the roof, the sheets were gone for laundry day. Rina was snoozing on the floor, having lost a battle with Megumi’s slippers and too tired to even jump up on the bed. 

Megumi herself was running late, caught in bad weather and only a short way away from the apartment. She would come in quietly, sneak into the bedroom, and look at him with amusement, calling him silly for nodding off so early without her, before offering a goodnight kiss and crawling into bed with him.

For a moment, just a tiny little moment, it almost felt like home.

“G’night, Megumi.”


End file.
